Short-term debt and depressive symptoms may go hand-in-hand
Findings could inform changes to lending practices and provide new insights for mental health practitioners
2015-04-30
(Press-News.org) Results to be published in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues suggest that having short-term household debt -- credit cards and overdue bills -- increases depressive symptoms. The association is particularly strong among unmarried people, people reaching retirement age and those who are less well educated, according to a new study by lead author Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These are the first results to show the impact of different types of debt on depression and their effects on different sectors of the US population. Little evidence was found for an association with mid- or long-term debt.
"New debt contracts could be offered to vulnerable borrowers and the population sectors we identified could be targeted with help in building their financial capacity," says Berger. "The findings could also be used to help mental health practitioners better understand the impact of clients' borrowing habits on depression."
Debt contract provisions could include mandatory financial counselling and the right to rescind within a specified timeframe.
Those who had debt were younger, more likely to be male, less likely to be black or Hispanic, had more highly educated parents, were more highly educated themselves, were more likely to be married and working, had greater income and assets, and were in better health.
It was when the researchers began to adjust for measures of socio-economic status, and to refine their analysis to subgroups defined by age, education and marital status, that a negative association began to emerge. They also controlled for reverse causality to check that debt was causing depression and not vice versa.
The study was focused on around 8,500 working-age adults. The data were taken from two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households, conducted six years apart and ending in 1994. Overall findings included the fact that 79 percent of respondents had some debt, totalling an average of $42,000. Long-term debt accounted for by far the largest portion.
Spurred by increased homeownership and an increase in unsecured revolving credit card debt, household debt has increased dramatically in the last 40 years. While it has declined since 2008 as credit has become more difficult to obtain, it remains at historically high levels.
The researchers suggest that future research should include an analysis of whether the effects can be reversed and reducing short-term debt can help alleviate symptoms of depression.
INFORMATION:
Reference
Berger L et al (2015). Household Debt and Adult Depressive Symptoms in the United States. Journal of Family and Economic Issues; DOI
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-04-30
Scientists are using a variety of buoys and autonomous underwater vehicles to record and archive sounds from marine mammals and fish species in the western North Atlantic through a new listening network known as the U.S. Northeast Passive Acoustic Sensing Network (NEPAN).
Stretching from the northern Gulf of Maine to the New York Bight in the northwest Atlantic Ocean, NEPAN provides year-round, long-term information on the presence and physical distribution of vocal whales, dolphins and porpoises and some fish species. The archived and near-real-time data comes from recorders ...
2015-04-30
Researchers at Aalto University (Finland) and Amherst College (USA) have observed a point-like monopole in a quantum field itself for the first time. This discovery connects to important characteristics of the elusive monopole magnet. The results were just published in Science magazine.
The researchers performed an experiment in which they manipulated a gas of rubidium atoms prepared in a nonmagnetic state near absolute zero temperature. Under these extreme conditions they were able to create a monopole in the quantum-mechanical field that describes the gas.
'In this ...
2015-04-30
LA JOLLA -- A study tying the aging process to the deterioration of tightly packaged bundles of cellular DNA could lead to methods of preventing and treating age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, as detailed April 30, 2015, in Science.
In the study, scientists at the Salk Institute and the Chinese Academy of Science found that the genetic mutations underlying Werner syndrome, a disorder that leads to premature aging and death, resulted in the deterioration of bundles of DNA known as heterochromatin.
The discovery, made possible through ...
2015-04-30
HOUSTON - (April 30, 2015) - With the Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations in 2000 coming to an end in 2015, and the new Sustainable Development Goals now in the works to establish a set of targets for the future of international development, experts at Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new tool to show why neglected tropical diseases, the most common infections of the world's poor, should be an essential component of these goals.
Using World Health Organization data for the number people at risk of parasitic worm infections in each ...
2015-04-30
A detailed study of marine animals that died out over the past 23 million years can help identify which animals and ocean ecosystems may be most at risk of extinction today, according to an international team of paleontologists and ecologists.
In a paper to be published in the May 1 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions report that worldwide patterns of extinction remained remarkably similar over this period, with the same groups of animals showing similar rates of extinction throughout and with a ...
2015-04-30
Demand for seafood from wild fisheries and aquaculture around the world has nearly doubled over the past four decades. In the past several years, major retailers in developed countries have committed to source their seafood from only sustainably certified fisheries and aquaculture, even though it is not clear where that supply will come from.
A team of researchers led by the University of California, Davis, has focused its attention on fishery improvement projects, or FIPs, which are designed to bring seafood from wild fisheries to the certified market, with only a promise ...
2015-04-30
HIV-1 continues to spread globally. While neither a cure, nor an effective vaccine are available, recent focus has been put on 'treatment-for-prevention', which is a method by which treatment is used to reduce the contagiousness of an infected person. A study published this week in PLOS Computational Biology challenges current treatment paradigms in the context of 'treatment for prevention' against HIV-1.
Sulav Duwal, Max von Kleist and their collaborators develop and employ optimal control theory to compute and assess diagnostic-guided vs. pro-active treatment strategies ...
2015-04-30
Proteins inside a cell are in constant motion, changing shape continuously in order to carry out their functions. In addition, their multiple component atoms each have individual patterns of motion, making the entire protein a system of non-stop highly complex movement. Understanding how a protein moves is the key to developing drugs that can efficiently interact with it. But because of this complexity, protein motion has been notoriously difficult to study. Scientists at EPFL, IBS-Grenoble, and ENS-Lyon, have developed a new method for studying protein motion by first ...
2015-04-30
The fossil record helps to predict which kinds of animals are more likely to go extinct. When combined with information about hotspots of human impacts and climate-change predictions, Smithsonian scientists and colleagues pinpoint animal groups and geographic areas of highest concern for marine conservation in the May 1 issue of Science magazine.
"Just as some groups of people are more prone to health problems like diabetes or heart disease, we can tell from the fossil record which groups of animals are naturally more likely to go extinct," said Aaron O'Dea, paleontologist ...
2015-04-30
If you thought that a beetle with a machine gun built into its rear end was something that only exists in sci-fi movies, you should talk to Wendy Moore at the University of Arizona.
Many beetles secrete foul-smelling or bad-tasting chemicals from their abdomens to ward off predators, but bombardier beetles take it a step further. When threatened, they combine chemicals in an explosive chemical reaction chamber in their abdomen to simultaneously synthesize, heat and propel their defensive load as a boiling hot spray, complete with "gun smoke." They can even precisely ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Short-term debt and depressive symptoms may go hand-in-hand
Findings could inform changes to lending practices and provide new insights for mental health practitioners
